PY4804 Philosophy of Logic

Week 4: Truthmaking and Identity Theories

1. Armstrong’s Philosophy Naturalistic, physicalist and non-reductionist:

(i) Naturalism That everything is composed of natural entities, those studied in science, and that the
best methods of enquiry are those of natural science.

(ii) Physicalism That everything that exists is purely physical, that the only real properties are physical,
or can be reduced to physical properties, or supervene on physical properties.
(iii) Factualism What primarily exist are states of affairs (or facts), whose constituents are particulars and
universals.

(iv) Tropes Armstrong rejects (but on increasingly weaker grounds) metaphysical theories based on
tropes:

(a) Tropes are individual, particular qualities, incapable of being multiply instantiated (unlike
universals).

(b) Varieties of trope nominalism:

(α) bundle theories (D.C. Williams, K. Campbell): an object is (nothing more than) a
mereological sum of tropes
(β) substance-trope theories: a particular consists of a collection of tropes attached to an
individual substance:
• transferable tropes: how are the tropes attached to the substance?

• non-transferable tropes (C.B. Martin): tropes can exist only as tropes of a certain substance,
and so need nothing to attach them to it.

(v) The Thin and Thick Particulars

(a) The thin particular: the subject to which qualities (universals) attach. Locke: that “we know not
what” which supports qualities (Essay II 23 1-2); Armstrong: but given in perception, since
perception is propositional (WSA 7.11).

(b) The thick particular: the particular with all its non-relational properties.
(c) For the history of the thick and the thin in Western Philosophy, see P.V. Spade, 'The Warp and
Woof of Metaphysics: how to get started on some big themes':

http://pvspade.com/Logic/docs/WarpWoof.pdf

2. Supervenience

(i) Properties (facts, objects, …) of type A supervene on properties (…) of type B when there can be no
A-difference without a B-difference, i.e., two things cannot differ in A-type properties without
differing in B-type properties (so identity in B-type properties entails identity in A-type properties).
Usually includes in addition: non-reducibility of A to B; and dependence of A on B. So usually
asymmetric.

(ii) Armstrong: A World of States of Affairs (p. 11): an “entity Q supervenes upon entity P if and only if
it is impossible that P should exist and Q not exist, where P is possible … we shall say that Q
supervenes upon P if and only if there are P-worlds and all P-worlds are Q-worlds. (A P-world is a
world that contains the entity P).” (Note that so defined, ‘supervene’ can be symmetric.)
(iii) Kim’s definitions (‘Supervenience as a philosophical concept’, in Kim and Sosa ed., Metaphysics):
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(a) Weak supervenience: In any possible world, any two individuals that differ in their A-
properties also differ in their B-properties.

(b) Strong supervenience : If any two individuals might differ in their A-properties then they will
differ in their B-properties too, i.e., given individuals i in world w1 and j in w2, if i and j differ in
their A-properties then they differ in their B-properties.

(c) Global supervenience (of everything on physics): any two physically possible worlds differing
in some respect also differ in some physical respect.

(iv) The ethical supervenes on the natural: there cannot be a difference in the ethical properties of some
action or person without a corresponding difference in their non-ethical, or natural properties. This is
not to deny the existence or importance of the ethical, or to reduce it to the natural or to eliminate it.
The supervenience of the mental does not seek to eliminate or reject talk of the mental, or even to try
to reduce it to the physical by correlating particular mental aspects or events with physical events. It
claims that the basis of the mental is the physical, and mental attributes cannot run free of that
physical basis, but are always accompanied by physical differences and changes.

3. The Supervenience of Truth

(i) Truthmaking: if a proposition is true, something makes it true.

Truth is a substantial property, but not an intrinsic one. Truth is supervenient.

So there is no difference in truth-value without a difference in matters beyond that of propositions

(for short, “the world”). Truth supervenes on how things are, in the world.

(ii) (TM) (Truthmaker) If p is true then something makes p true

(EA) (The Entailment Analysis) If s makes p true, then the existence of s entails that p is true

(DS) p is true if and only if p

(EA1) If s makes p true then the existence of s entails p

(TM1) If p is true then there is something whose existence entails p

(ET) (The Entailment Thesis) If s makes p true and p entails q, then s makes q true

(iii) (a) Suppose p is false; then ¬p is true, so by (TM), there must be something that makes it true.
But what of negative existentials, for example? So (TM) seems too strong.

(b) To say that there is no difference in things of one type without a difference in things of the other
allows two possibilities: both that the addition of things of the second leads to a change in things
of the first, and that the removal of things of the second does so too. Thus an entity Q may
supervene on an entity P not only by the existence of P’s entailing that of Q, but equally by the
absence of P's entailing the presence of Q, or the presence of P’s entailing the absence of Q, or
finally the absence of P’s entailing the absence of Q. In particular, if Q is present, that can result
from either the existence or the non-existence of P.

(ST) For every p, if p is true then either there is something whose existence entails that p is true,
or there is something whose non-existence entails that p is true, that is, which would have
existed were p not true.
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4. The Truthmaker Argument

(i) Armstrong’s truthmaker argument, “perhaps the fundamental argument'” of A World of States of
Affairs (pp. 115-6):
“The truthmaker for a truth must necessitate that truth … Let it be the case that particular a
instantiates universal F: a is F … The truthmaker or ground cannot be a … the particular apart
from its properties. Can it be the pair a and F? … But … it is possible that a and F should both
exist and yet a not be F. F may be instantiated elsewhere … The obvious candidate [as the
ontological ground for the truth that a is F] seems to be the state of affairs of a’s being F.”

(ii) So states of affairs are more than the sum (see §5) of their parts.

(iii) David Lewis criticizes the truthmaker argument for confusing the supervenience of truth on how
things are with its supervenience on whether they are (Australasian Journal of Philosophy 70,
1992, pp. 218-9). Rather, he proposes things qua truthmakers (‘Things qua Truthmakers’, in Real
Metaphysics, ed. H. Lillehammer and G. Rodriguez-Pereyra, pp. 25-38).

(iv) But Armstrong and Lewis agree that truthmakers necessitate the truth of what they make true. So
Lewis proposes e.g., Long qua black, the cat Long together with its black counterparts, as the
truthmaker of ‘Long is black’, or even Long qua just as he is.

(v)In an appendix (pp. 39-41), Lewis and Rosen propose the world qua total, i.e. the world qua nothing
added, as truthmaker or negative existentials.

5. Mereology
(i) The theory of part and whole. Two things overlap if they have a common part; otherwise they are
distinct.

Axiom 1: any collection of parts forms a whole. Whenever there are some things, there is their fusion
(Unrestricted Composition)

Axiom 2: any wholes whose parts are the same are the same. The same things never have different
fusions (Uniqueness of Composition)
(a) mereological sum (or fusion): the fusion of some things has all of them as parts and has no part
distinct from them.
(b) x is part of y if everything that overlaps x overlaps y (i.e., everything distinct from y is distinct
from x); equivalently, x is part of y if y is a fusion of x and z, for some z.

(c) ‘part of’ is transitive (i.e., if x is part of y and y is part of z, then x is part of z).

(d) The ontological free lunch: a mereological sum supervenes on its parts, and what supervenes is
no addition of being.

(e) Peter Simons describes a mereology as a (complete) Boolean algebra without zero element. That
is, besides the operation of fusion, there are operations of complementation and intersection,
restricted, however, by the absence of a null element. A whole is no more than the sum (or
fusion) of its parts, and so, if there are no parts, there is no whole.

(ii) Kit Fine claims (Synthese 53, 1982, p. 67) that there are no properly disjunctive facts and
mereological combination is the sole basis for compounding facts. Suppose there were such a
disjunctive fact, he says. Then it would be composed of a disjunctive operation on the two facts
corresponding to the disjuncts, and so both disjuncts would be true. So it would be both necessary
and sufficient for the existence of a disjunctive fact that its disjuncts were both true. Hence such a
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disjunction would be indistinguishable from conjunction. So there is only one mode of compounding
facts, namely, mereological fusion.

(iii) states of affairs are more than the mereological sum of their parts, a collection of particulars and a
quality of or relation between them.

(iv) the thick particular is a state of affairs, since it must be more than the mereological sum of its parts
(the particular and its qualities).
(v) how are the particular(s) and universal joined together? Bad question: cf. ‘act’ and ‘cat’. The parts are
abstractions from the whole, but the whole is more than its parts. There is no extra part which glues
the (other) parts together.

6. The Identity Theory

(i) Frege’s Regress Argument: Frege claimed that the correspondence theory of truth was untenable
because it leads to vicious regress: p because it is true that p because it is true that it is true that p and
so on. That there is such a series of ever longer repetitions of the prefix ‘it is true that’ is
uncontestable. The crucial question is whether the regress is vicious:

“Any … attempt to define truth … breaks down. For in a definition certain characteristics would
have to be specified. And in application to any particular case the question would always arise
whether it were true that the characteristics were present. So we would be going round in a circle
… The meaning of the word ‘true’ seems to be altogether sui generis. May we not be dealing here
with something which cannot be called a property in the ordinary sense at all?'” (‘The Thought’, in
The Frege Reaader, ed. M. Beaney, pp. 329, 331)
(ii) Frege directs most of his argument against the correspondence theory, that “truth consists in a
correspondence of a picture to what it depicts”: “if the first did correspond perfectly with the second,
they would coincide'” (op.cit., p. 327). So Russell:

“An idea is to be true when it corresponds with reality, i.e. when it is true that it corresponds with
reality, i.e. when the idea that it corresponds with reality corresponds with reality, and so on
…Two courses are now open to us: we may make truth a property of judgments … or we may
make truth a property of the objects of judgments, i.e. of what we may call facts. The former is the
course adopted by idealism; the latter is the course I wish to advocate.” (B. Russell, ‘The Nature of
Truth’, in A. Urquhart (ed.), The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, vol. 4: Foundations of
Logic 1903-05, pp. 493, 504)

That is, any correspondence adequate for truth would be identity. As Dodd puts it, “facts are true
thoughts'” (J. Dodd, The Identity Theory of Truth, p. 80). Thoughts, or propositions, the object of the
propositional attitudes (belief, knowledge, desire, propounding or proposing, and so on) are, when
true, facts. True thoughts, or propositions, are the same as, are identical to, facts, and facts are how
things are. So truth consists in coincidence, the limit case of correspondence, of thought and fact.

(iii) Dodd distinguishes robust from modest identity theories. Modest theories, like Frege’s identify facts
with true thoughts, where “thoughts are senses of sentences”. Dodd says that propositions have
“constituents which go proxy for the objects they are about … we should regard [propositions] as
complexes of senses.'' (op.cit., pp. 68-9) According to the modest theory, to identify facts with
thoughts is to deny that there is anything propositional in the world. There is no state of affairs, Dodd
believes, e.g., of Frege's being a philosopher. Strawson urged this claim, against Austin:

“That … to which the referring part of the statement refers, and which the describing part of the
statement fits or fails to fit, is that which the statement is about. It is evident that there is nothing
else in the world for the statement itself to be related to … The only plausible candidate for the
position of what (in the world) makes the statement true is the fact it states; but the fact it states is
not something in the world.'' (‘Truth’, in Lynch pp. 451-2)

(iv) In contrast, the robust theory reverses the identity, and identifies true thoughts with facts, conceived
as states of affairs. When I think or recall or propose that Frege was a logician, it is the fact that I
think, not some intermediary impression or abstraction that I think, recall or propose. Where the
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modest theory denies that the content of a true judgment or belief corresponds to any compound of
things the judgment is about, the robust theory denies there is any intermediary object of belief to
which the state of affairs, the fact whose constituents are those things, can correspond. In thought we
directly apprehend the fact containing the objects referred to. The proposition, as object of belief, is
the fact as state of affairs. The proposition contains the things referred to—“That’s right, John
himself, right there, trapped in a proposition.” (D. Kaplan, ‘DThat’, in P. Yourgrau (ed.),
Demonstratives, p. 13, describing Russell’s theory of propositions)

Instead of identifying the fact with the thought (the sense) as the modest theory does, the robust
theory identifies the thought with the fact (as state of affairs, compounded of the referents). Either
way, fact and thought are the same.

(v) What then is truth? The modest theory makes a metaphysical claim: there are no states of affairs, no
worldly object of a propositional nature. The robust theory makes an epistemological claim: the
object of thought and knowledge is the fact itself, without intermediary. It is a direct realism about
epistemology and mind. But what of truth? In what does truth consist? Indeed, what is falsehood? If
true thoughts are facts, what are false thoughts?

(vi) Consider the robust theory, first. According to this theory, a propositional attitude, if veridical, is an
attitude towards a fact, where a fact is a state of affairs, that is, an actual state of affairs. Thus a
mistaken attitude must be a relation to a non-actual state of affairs. Russell came to reject this
account of truth, since it commits us to there being things which don’t exist. It might seem that the
robust identity theory can defend itself against this charge, for it does distinguish existing states of
affairs, true thoughts or propositions, from non-existing ones, false thoughts. Russell’s objection to
this view was that “truth and falsehood, in this view, are ultimate, and no account can be given of
what makes a proposition true or false.” (‘On the Nature of Truth’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society 7, 1906-7, p. 48)
This way of putting the objection invites the response that the difference lies in whether the state of
affairs exists: facts are states of affairs which exist, falsehoods those which do not. But this is to miss
the point. Take the proposition that Frege was a woman, for example. According to the robust theory,
this is an objective falsehood, a non-existing state of affairs, for Frege was not a woman. In what
sense, then, do we have here a state of affairs at all? We have particular and universal, Frege and
womanhood, the constituents of the putative state. But since Frege was not a woman, the consituents
do not constitute a state of affairs—there is no unity. There is no such state.
So the real problem for the robust theory is not the claimed objectivity of non-existent states of
affairs, but their unity. What constitutes the unity of a false proposition? The constituents are thought
together, but if the thought is false, they are not in fact together, and there is nothing to think. Direct
realism in epistemology cannot account for error in representation. This the reason why Dodd
embraces the modest theory. He writes:

“Such an account of propositions is unable to leave room for a proposition’s being false … The
entities a, b and R can only be unified into a proposition by virtue of being united in fact … the
constituents of a proposition can only be unified, and hence form a proposition, if the proposition
is true.” (The Identity Theory of Truth, pp. 113-4)

The proposition cannot be an object of reference, containing a, b and R, or Frege and womanhood,
but must, he concludes, be an object of sense, composed of the senses, or modes of presentation, of
them.

(vii) We still need an answer, however, to the question: how are true thoughts different from false ones?
The modest theory can accommodate false thoughts—combinations of senses—but it cannot explain
how they can be false, since it denies itself the means to do so. The modest theory, in order to allow
for falsehood, allows unity too easily: we need only to think the constituents together; but it denies
any propositional reality beyond the thought.

7. Conclusion

Truth is external to the proposition, a property the proposition has in virtue of its relation to
something else. True propositions are not identical to facts. Facts are what make true propositions
true.